“Roswell” only sounds stupid

Ten years ago, the Deseret News Archives published an article about the new The WB show “Roswell”. Melinda Metz herself told the Crashdown.com staff about text.

This is one of the first reviews of the show:

“WB’s new ‘Roswell’ only sounds stupid”
It’s actually a very promising new show about teens, Tuesday, October 5, 1999

“Roswell” is another one of those really stupid-sounding ideas for a TV show that, oddly enough, works. And works extremely well.

The premise is, well, sort of awful sounding. Three teenagers living in Roswell, N.M., turn out to be survivors of an alien spacecraft that crashed there some years earlier. They don’t know who they are or where they came from, and they’ve got to keep their identities as extra-terrestrials secret or risk being locked up as part of some sort of government experiment.

Sounds pretty stupid — just like the idea of having a teenage girl battle the forces of evil in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” And, like “Buffy,” this new show features some of television’s most realistic teenagers, albeit in a considerably less than realistic setting.

Wednesday’s pilot episode (8 p.m., Ch. 30) starts out with a bang. Literally. Liz (Shiri Appleby), a high school student and part-time waitress, is accidentally shot during a holdup. She’s in bad shape until Max (Jason Behr), a boy in her class, comes over and uses his alien powers to miraculously heal her. Of course, he’s putting himself and his fellow aliens — his sister, Isabel (Katherine Heigl), and best friend, Michael (Brendan Fehr) — at considerable risk of discovery.